When I was at Readercon over the summer, I attended a panel where Scott Lynch introduced himself as the author of the “increasingly non-fictional” The Republic of Thieves. Knowing absolutely nothing about the Gentlemen Bastards series or the whole thing where the publication date of this book had been pushed back by a few years, I assumed that The Republic of Thieves must be some sort of political dystopian book about, like, corruption and oligarchy and banking fuckery, or something.

I was extremely confused when I first figured out what the Gentlemen Bastards series actually was.

Oddly enough, it turns out that The Republic of Thieves largely is about corruption and oligarchy and using massive amounts of money to illegally bork up elections, but simultaneously, that was the most wrong I was about anything that entire summer.

To start with the basics: The Republic of Thieves was published in October. It is the third book in the Gentlemen Bastards series. It is exactly 650 pages long; you could kill someone with the hardback. But you wouldn’t want to, because the cover art is too sumptuous to get blood on. Also, my copy is personalized and autographed, so nyah nyah.

The book opens with Locke dying a horrible bleedy death due to the poison he was given in Red Seas Under Red Skies, and he’s even more of a whiny, suicidally self-pitying mess than he was at the beginning of that book. Jean is again doing the If You Die I’ll Kill You Myself angry caregiver thing, and does a fabulous bit of psychoanalyzing Locke (he diagnoses him with a death wish, complete with awesome German-analogue name for it).

Locke is saved from his horrible bleedy death at the dramatic last minute by a Bondsmage of Karthain, one of the terrifyingly powerful band of sorcerers who have been messing with Locke and Jean ever since they mutilated the Falconer. This Bondsmage lets us know that there are political factions within the Bondsmage society, and she is of the team that has not been the one actively fucking with Locke and Jean. She is also the Falconer’s mother. She offers to unpoison Locke in exchange for Locke and Jean helping the political party backed by her faction win a majority of seats in the upcoming elections for the Konseil, Karthain’s governing body.

The opposing party also has a shady campaign advisor backed by the opposing faction of Bondsmagi. The shady campaign advisor turns out to be Sabetha Belacoros, former Gentleman Bastard (or Gentlewoman Bastard), the one and only lady Locke has ever had any sort of romantic interest in. She is also the only lady who has ever been able to trounce Locke in trickery, thieving, and general rogueishness—essentially, she is his Irene Adler, but with more swearing.

The book switches back and forth between this storyline and “Interludes” from Locke’s youth, mostly involving a summer when all the Bastards, now in their mid-teens, are sent off to an absolute clusterfuck of a theatrical company in Espara in order to learn ACTING. They put on a rather fabulous-sounding ancient Therin play called The Republic of Thieves, about a prince who is sent to put down a crime ring and instead falls star-crossedly in love with its fabulous lady-thief leader, Amadine the Queen of Shadows, and nearly everyone dies. During this summer, Locke and Sabetha have an awkward and bickering-filled start of a romance while working together to build like four different elaborate cons in order to keep the clusterfuck of an acting company operating.

As usual, all of the cons in both timelines are completely delightful—heavy on both fast-paced action and sneaky cleverness, with plentiful side helpings of wonderful swearing and insults. It’s one of those books where the main distraction is trying to stop and memorize lines for future use. (The second main distraction is stopping to drool over the food and then go get a snack and a beer.) (In completely unrelated news, I am mysteriously out of beer.) The entire GB lineup falls squarely into the Loveable Rogues category, but they are all distinct (and distinctly fun) characters.

Especially Sabetha.

I admit that, as we’ve only seen Sabetha as Locke’s Mysterious Red-Headed Fixation Object so far, she would turn out to be a flat or Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ish type of character. I should not have worried. Sabetha is a great character—she’s courageous, but entirely aware of (and, yes, afraid of) the dangers that she and the other Bastards face. Like Locke, she’s incredible clever and skilled in various kinds of shenaniganry, and, like Locke, this doesn’t prevent her from getting into real, interesting conflict and trouble. She’s much more socially aware than the rest of the Bastards in certain ways—she’s got an excellent grasp of the GB power dynamics, for example—and, as a result, she’s deeply cranky and suspicious of everyone and everything. She’s incredibly bitchy and difficult in a way that speaks to me on a deep level. Some of this has to do with what is basically exhausted cranky feminism; more personally, Sabetha is extremely choice- and agency-conscious and is extremely wary of ideals of fate, inevitability, destiny, etc. in romantic love. She is unwilling to get pinned down into a relationship just because That’s How It Works or The Universe Says So or whatever. The result of this is that she keeps running away from Locke and then I am sad for Locke because he is our awesome viewpoint character but at the same time I am like “I feel u, girl! Go have adventures!” Also, I think for a lot of properly socialized ladies, and particularly shy ones like me, there is an element of power fantasy in bitchy lady characters. The fantasy of freely telling people what you think of them without stopping to deflect and minimize conflict at every turn is an alluring one. (Witness the popularity of the Dowager Countess Grantham even amongst very liberal women, despite her being an archconservative entitled bigot.) (Plus, fantasizing about being an asshole is much less dangerous to one’s health than, say, dating the tactless dude assholes who say all the things you’re too nice to say to people.) (This is your official answer to Why Do Nice Girls Date Assholes. You can stop asking now.) ANYWAY, BACK TO SABETHA. She is not above using Feminine Wiles™ to con people if that’s how they would most effectively be conned, and she doesn’t apologize for it, but it’s not her only trick. She curses just as delightfully as the rest of the GBs. She can apparently rig an election like nobody’s business. You guys, I am like this close to making an Honest Book Copy submission for this book just because I think the current copy does a weaksauce job of wibbling about how awesome Sabetha is.

There is also a cute but sadly small cameo by Regal the ship’s cat, which was still enough for my own cat to develop an absolute vendetta against this book, and she spent the better part of three days constantly maneuvering to sit on the pages so I could not read them. I have pictures.

The book ends on the OMINOUS NOTE of a deeply dangerous and complete assbag of a character being not as dead or disempowered as we had previously thought, so I’m sure The Thorn of Emberlain will contain lots of excitement in the form of creepy painful things happening to Locke and everyone around him. CAN'T WAIT.

The latest from the Books By Cool People I Met At Readercon files: I just finished reading The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch, the first book in the Gentlemen Bastards series, the third book of which releases in October. I have plans to attend a book signing for it in Cambridge with my writing group, so I figured it was imperative I read this series in a timely manner.

The author, Scott Lynch, was a thoroughly entertaining and informative speaker; I saw him on a panel called “The Xanatos Gambit,” which was about schemes and conspiracies and such. He is dating the infamously hilarious Elizabeth Bear, whose books I will also be reading as soon as they arrive. *eyes mailbox impatiently* He also has very nice hair.

The Lies of Locke Lamora takes place in a semi-Renaissance-y city called Camorr, which seems to be largely based on Venice, but with more sharks. Which is extra awesome and scary since Venice, and thereby Camorr, mostly has canals instead of roads. So there are SHARKS EVERYWHERE. Shark-fighting is, in fact, one of Camorr’s premier entertainments; by Camorran custom, only women can fight sharks.

Camorr is ruled by a Duke named Duke Nicovante, who nobody really cares about, and Camorr’s gangs are all ruled by a guy named Capa Barsavi, who consolidated all the gangs and developed a “Secret Peace” with the legitimate establishment that basically means that the gangs can steal and murder and stuff as long as they don’t steal from (a) policemen or (b) nobles. If you think this is a really fucked up and classist Secret Peace, you are right! And you will probably like our heroes, who pretend to hold with the Secret Peace but really don’t.

Now, this is not particularly an Issues Book, and the Gentlemen Bastards only do half the Robin Hood thing. They steal from the rich… because the rich have the most money, so they are the ones that you can steal the most money from! They don’t really give to the poor, though; mostly they just chuck all the money in a vault and take from it if they need to buy equipment for a scam. It’s actually kind of adorable.

The Gentlemen Bastards consists of:
LOCKE LAMORA: Locke Lamora has been a genius thief since he was first found by the Thiefmaker of Camorr (a Fagin-esque character who picks up orphans and trains the in pickpocketing so he can sell them to gangs later). The Thiefmaker sold him to a con man in record time because it was near impossible to stop baby Locke from trying out schemes that were clever, but way beyond the Thiefmaker’s pay grade in terms of fallout that Locke, being five, had not thought about. As an adult, Locke is a shortish, unassuming-looking dude, skinny, neither attractive nor unattractive; a master of disguise, who pretends to be a regular cat burglar in Capa Barsavi’s employ, but is actually a master swindler who has bilked enough of Camorr’s nobles out of enough thousands of crowns that he’s known as the Thorn of Camorr.
JEAN TANNEN: Jean is a big, fat, ugly motherfucker who is the bruiser of the gang. He carries a pair of hatchets called the Wicked Sisters, although he can probably kill you with pretty much anything he gets his hands on, or just with his hands, in a pinch. From the highest-class background among the Bastards, he also likes reading poetry and classic romances. The main relationship in this book is Jean and Locke’s bromance, which is truly bromantic.
CALO AND GALDO SANZA: Identical twins, known for being handsome (if with somewhat large noses), spending a lot of time at brothels, finishing each other’s sentences, and being outrageously skilled card sharks. (Nobody in Camorr says “card sharks” though because there are too many sharks around already.)
BUG: The Bastards’ teenage apprentice.
SABETHA: The lone female Gentlemen Bastard, she is off somewhere on a mysterious Mission or something, so we do not meet her during this book. Locke is rather hopelessly in love with her. Apparently she is a redhead. Scott Lynch appears to have felt that going on too much about the Lone Female Bastard Who Is Also The Love Interest And Is Apparently A Feisty Redhead would be somewhat cliché, so for now the Gentlemen Bastards is functionally all gentlemen.

The main antagonist is a fellow called the Grey King, who is killing off a bunch of Capa Barsavi’s garristas, meaning the heads of his gangs. This worries Locke, since, while he is careful to not be very important, he is officially the head of one of Capa Barsavi’s gangs.

Once I figured out that this was a story where the hero was a dude, his core group o’ buddies were all dudes, and the villain was a dude, I was somewhat prepared to be disappointed at this story being a Wall o’ Dude and there being no ladies, except maybe one Token Awesome Lady Who Is Awesome Because She’s The Only Lady And Is Not Like the Other Ladies. This turns out to have been a radically incorrect assumption on my part. Other dude authors who wish to write about dude heroes and their dude friends, please take note: You can, in fact, write a story about a dude hero and his best dude friends without leaving out the women entirely or reducing them to one-dimensional caricatures! The Lies of Locke Lamora has a lot of female secondary and tertiary characters, many of whom are flat-out AWESOME and have quite a bit of agency, and the rest of whom at least help the book avoid the weird Tolkien thing where the General Populace just seems to be all men. So we have some lady shark-fighters, as previously mentioned; a slew of female priestesses, alchemists, prison guards (!), gang members, pickpockets, merchants, and general random people; a batty old noblewoman who is not nearly as batty as she seems because she is actually the Duke’s spymaster; a beautiful young doña who, while her involvement in the story begins because she and her husband are a mark for one of the Bastards’ schemes, is also a highly accomplished botanical alchemist (I kind of want to be best friends with Doña Sofia, actually; she grows oranges infused with liquor); and, possibly one of my favorite characters of all time, Nazca Barsavi.

People who know me will understand why Nazca Barsavi is everything I want in a character. She is the daughter of Capa Barsavi, and she’s actually heavily involved in running the family business, making her a high-ranking mafiosa in her own right and quite likely to become the next Capa of Camorr if they can find a way to make her meathead older brothers deal with it. She wears steel-toed boots, because steel-toed boots are awesome, and she also wears glasses (er, optics). I had not even realized what an extreme shortage of kickass ladies who WEAR GLASSES there is in pretty much all storytelling ever. More of this, please! She is also friends with Locke! Actual, straight-up, honest-to-goodness friends, where they talk about stuff and clearly care about each other and when Capa Barsavi decides that they should get married, they are both all like “No offense, but together we are clever enough to find a way out of this stupid plan, right?” and then they agree to PLOT and SCHEME and BE AWESOME until they figure out a way to NOT marry each other without pissing off the Capa. She is also super bossy in flashback to when she was seven, and it is adorable. Basically, she is THE GREATEST. I would read an entire series just about Nazca Barsavi.

So you can understand how amazingly upset I was when the Gray King FRIDGED HER.

I specifically say the Gray King fridged her because honestly, Scott Lynch/the story in general didn’t. Lynch seems to be a member of the George R. R. Martin School of Killing Off Characters Right When You Are Really Excited To See What They’re Going To Do Next, so she’s not particularly singled out here (unfortunately for the readers’ feels). She also isn’t tortured or mutilated graphically or sexually molested or anything gratuitous like that. Her death was not a cheap plot point to engender manpain in our hero because otherwise the plot was sagging. Rather, the Gray King killed her specifically to show her father, Capa Barsavi, (who is emphatically not our hero) that he could get to him, and to upset Barsavi out of hiding. The text shines a pretty bright and unsubtle spotlight on how totally fucked up that sort of thing is by having all the characters whose “side” we are more or less on explicitly state that THAT IS REALLY FUCKED UP, LIKE A LOT and also berate Capa Barsavi for getting all vengeful because DUDE THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE WANTED YOU TO DO ARE YOU STUPID OR SOMETHING. So honestly I cannot really fault it from a storytelling point of view as being anywhere near as lazy as the usual Hero’s Girlfriend Is Killed Horribly, Vengeful Rampage Ensues. BUT I CAN BE MAD THAT THERE WAS NO MORE AWESOMENESS WITH NAZCA AFTER THAT POINT. And I am. Maybe if more books had characters like Nazca I would be less stuck on this.

Anyway. So Scott Lynch has proven that you actually CAN write a nonsexist book even with dude main characters, and also that we need more kickass ladies with glasses. Take note, people.

On a less sociologically-oriented note, the scams, cons, chases, and general conniving fuckery in this book is SO MUCH FUN. There is crossing and double-crossing and fake double-crossing, multiple layers of false identities, a disguised Locke getting punched in the face while the puncher explains “And that’s from Locke Lamora,” cursing, fire, pretty costumes, and, of course, more sharks. There is also some really amazing-sounding food. Overall the book ends up being a weird but highly addicting mishmash of “all the fun fluff!” and “very serious feels-punching.” Lynch particularly seems to enjoy putting Locke through a lot of physical abuse, causing long periods of suffering, which is a nice change from the Cartoon Biology that affects so many fantasy books (and its even more widespread Hollywood cousin, Cartoon Physics, which seems to have utterly taken over every live-action movie with a budget of more than about ten dollars).

Overall, I am very excited to read the second book, and also for the release of the third book, and also the author signing for the third book so I can tell Mr. Lynch to his face that just because I’m buying his books does NOT mean I forgive him for killing off Nazca.